Tallah

“I do not threaten you.” Her own anger rose to the fore and she bit through her lip, drawing the rich coppery taste of blood. It woke her up in the maelstrom. “You have been killed. I am offering fact.”

Flashes of images assaulted the bastion of her mind, a torrent of fury and sizzling hatred. A battle raged and she was part of it. Chunks were ripped out of her and regrown painfully. Her blood boiled in her veins and she tried to rip herself in two to escape her own melting skin.

She would have screamed but the air burned in her and shredded the ruins of her lungs.

“The whore killed me?!”

Outrage blanketed the pain, muzzled every other sensation. A life’s work, burned away to ash. Ambition, crushed. The answers she sought, for which she’d given herself over to the endless work, lost forever.

Fury rose, the foam cresting a bulging wave of despair.

“I don’t know who you mean,” Quistis pushed out through pained breaths. She fought back tears as another memory rose, of flames licking at her naked body and flesh melting off bones.

These are all final moments, she realised with a jolt. The echo relived them with horrifying intensity.

“The whore killed me!”

“Who is she? Who are you?” Quistis asked again, allowing herself to submerge under the other’s pain. She needed to gain control of the exchange lest the other consume her. A mantra of centring leapt into her mind to prop her up and steel her resolve.

I am one of the many, and I am one of the few. I am—

“Healer, bear witness to her crime,” the voice called out. “I want vengeance for this ignoble death.”

You don’t deserve it, monster. I’ve seen your work. But she couldn’t match wills with this other. The echoing conscience was overwhelming and ravenous, so vicious that Quistis feared she might be crushed under its attention. There was an effort made for memories to be coherent.

With titanic force of will, the other built a vision for her.

She saw through countless eyes three people approaching. Her consciousness settled behind the eyes of a doll as it watched the intruders walk into the Mistress’s throne room.

One was a woman wearing black and gold, a mockery of the Storm Guard uniform. She wore her fire-red hair tied up in a ponytail and had a silver mask covering her face. Quistis recognized it from the catalogue in the Vault. Bloodless white lips smiled an obnoxious grin.

The one following her was a blonde woman, tall and slim, wearing silvery-white garments. Beautiful work, the observing minds whispered. What did that mean?

And last was a boy, skeletal and malnourished, wearing nothing but a horned helmet. No, he had armour covering him, but it was translucent, like glass. An enchantment, maybe? She could hear his heart, beating like a terrified rabbit’s.

“I did wonder who had gotten lost in my home,” the echo voice said, “scaring my children and trampling my work.”

That voice commanded her adoration and loyalty. Honey-sweet and chocolate-rich, it filled her chest with love. Who dared upset the Mistress? They would die a thousand deaths for the insult of being.

Quistis’s mind lurched as she watched from too many perspectives at once. She felt every twitch of every muscle of every creature in the room. There were hundreds, packed together tight, all watching the visitors with rapt, hungry attention.

She tasted the magic weave around the visitors, her senses heightened beyond anything human. Both women were dressed in illum, overflowing with it, shaped by it.

In a flash, she was next to them, circling them, drinking in the scent of their power. She saw herself, as the doll, opposite herself. There were two, sharing a mind, and she stretched to fit both and know what they learned.

The second one, the healer, had caught their attention. Her borrowed eyes saw beneath the veneer of beauty, into the core of the woman. She couldn’t count the scars under her fake skin.

I’m seeing through Iliaya’s enchantment. Sure enough, the healer had the staff in hand, looking exactly as the planted fake. Her hearts pounded in excitement at seeing through the deceit, at seeing the horrors the staff’s enchantment hid away. Quistis’s real heart gave a sharp pang of sympathy for her sister.

“What have you done to yourself, girl?” the Mistress asked, malice tinging her words.

“I am not here to reminisce with you, Anna,” the red haired woman said.

“Such a pity, Tallah. I couldn’t imagine what other business the whore of the Academy would have with me and mine.”

Anna and, more importantly, Tallah. Quistis had the names. It was enough.

But Anna’s echo was not done with her. This wasn’t what she needed known. A vice squeezed tighter around Quistis’s mind, urging her to watch on as events squeezed by.

Anna’s questions were light and her tone playful but Quistis knew the anger boiling beneath, the way the Mistress hated the other sorceress. It was just curiosity that kept her children back, the urge to understand why Tallah had assaulted her Sanctum. Why, after a century since they’d last seen each other, their first contact was such gross misconduct, unbefitting of two women of their high birth.

How powerful was she? Quistis found herself wondering at the strength of the two sorceresses as they stared each another down. Anna’s echo had a will of razor wire ferocity, and she would ultimately fall. She tried to break away from whatever it was trying to show her but the echo refused her efforts.

Save your effort, healer. I will release you when I’m done with you. I understand what you did to see this but I will not be made a simple tool to serve your ends. Bear witness so you may seek vengeance on my behalf. You will have no choice in the matter.

Witness to what? She already knew the blood mage would die in the inevitable clash.

Tallah undid the topmost button of her coat and reached into an inner pocket nestled against her heart. She produced a black crystal that she held out to Anna’s attention. It was the size of a pigeon egg and black as pitch, swallowing up light like a hole in reality.

Quistis’s real breath choked on the sight of that atrocity. So did Anna’s, reverberations of horror and disgusts melding with her own.

“I claim you, Anna Theala, born of mother Viostra Theala and father Logovich Eilan,” Tallah whispered to the crystal. It melted away from her hand and puffed to black smoke. She shook her hand of it. “Does that answer your question?”

A doll--pretending to be the Mistress--was on her feet, trembling. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” Her voice cracked like glass under the pressure of her anger.

“I’m as clearheaded as I’ve ever been.”

Quistis found herself appreciating Cinder’s voice. She saw the storied sorceress for the first time in the flesh, as it were, and the only thing she could think about was how pleasant and calm her voice was. The full horror of what the pyromancer had just unleashed refused to find purchase in her mind.

Soul theft…

Revulsion wracked her even as she thought the words. The One Sin. The only real sin in the minds of gods and mortals alike. The one unforgivable oath-breaking that could not be allowed to exist. Cinder had performed it so casually… so practised.

Music sang to her, a haunting melody that bypassed all senses to lodge itself into the mind, clawing its way into her very being. She couldn’t see where it came from, but she felt it like a draw on her essence, insistent with purpose. Hooks dug into her soul and yanked hard on her life.

Anna produced a bone-white wand and aimed it at Tallah.

“Let’s get this farce over with.”

The other woman cracked her knuckles and stood defiant against the many that came to the Mistress’s beckoning. She showed the silver wand at her belt but refused to reach for it.

Anna unleashed her children and Quistis was part of the assault. She felt her sisters dying, felt herself becoming less and less, until she was the last.

The Mistress dragged her out of the melee and sunk her under corpses, furiously pouring herself inside until the doll felt like bursting apart. Death breathed on the back of her neck but the Mistress kept her down and hidden, paralysed for the gambit.

You can’t oppose soul theft, girl, Anna’s echo whispered. They were now in the ruins of the aftermath. Her children lay dead and shattered. More were coming from the farthest reaches of her Sanctum but they could not arrive in time to save her life. Quistis’s perspective shifted and she realised she was seeing from the real Anna’s eyes. She waited for death even if she refused to admit she had been spent and defeated.

Cinder approached on unsteady feet, stumbling from her wounds. She held a sword that dripped blood.

I took the gamble. That’s the only way to survive soul theft, the gamble that the black gem accepts the death of the one that invoked it and turns its hunger on them. I failed to give it that.

Ghostly music howled in her. It was no longer a melody but mad laughter, crying and cursing, agony, ecstasy, fear. It was all being dragged out of her and swallowed by the gaping pit of black.

Cinder had her mask off as she leaned into her, silver eyes staring into the ruin she had wrought. She breathed with a gurgling wheeze.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

And Quistis felt the heat of the blade as it cut her throat.

She was thrown from the memory, stumbling back violently out of the cold storage. Barlo’s powerful hands caught and steadied her as she fought to calm her breathing. Tears ran down her face, and her nose and lip bled. She was screaming herself hoarse.

He spun her around. There was concern in his lined face. He said something to Aarhyansh but she couldn’t make out the words. Music still thrummed in her head and she felt herself being sucked out through the pores of her skin, emptied out from the marrow of her bones to the thoughts in her mind, poured into a prison of pitch black.

Quistis bent double and was violently sick all over Barlo’s boots.